It’s Friday night in Beijing and I’ve just returned from a stroll through Tiananmen Square. I thought I’d take a few moments to reflect on what things look like from this side of the Pacific.
Principally, I’d like to echo Naazneen’s comments that China could be a force for good in the world, and caution against analyses that dismiss this possibility outright.
Several of the preceding posts have made the important point that, rather that being wooed by China’s ‘charm’, a number of countries in the developing world will begin, if they have not already begun, to backlash against China’s foreign policies. The argument goes that as China becomes increasingly entangled overseas, it will use its growing power to push, prod, and coerce foreign governments. And to the extent that those governments are relatively oppressive and their people deprived, affected populations will blowback against the Chinese.
It is worth thinking a little further about the consequences of an erosion of China’s ‘soft power’.
As evidenced by the discussion so far, perhaps the most pressing question in contemporary international politics is how the rise of China will affect the current US-led international order. Both political science theory and traditional American foreign policy thought offer the same two alternatives: China can either assimilate to the liberal international system, as exemplified by Robert Zoellick’s notion of being a “responsible stakeholder”, or it can "balance" against the United States, by challenging and seeking to overthrow the prevailing norms and institutions embedded in the Bretton Woods architecture. This is a strongly held, but deeply misleading, dichotomy.
